Top 10 Worst Games Of 2012

2012 turned out to be a halfway decent year for gaming, all things considered. I mean, we got the phenomenal Walking Dead from Telltale Games, a new Halo game, and the criminally overlooked Far Cry 3, for starters. The indie scene brought us incredible hits like Journey and Fez, and even the mod scene delivered with the groundbreaking DayZ.

But even with so many great titles, 2012 managed to drop some real stinkers on us. We scraped the bottom of the barrel and managed to pull out ten games that we would have been a lot better off not having to play this year.

10. NeverDead

I think NeverDead might be trying to tell us that immortality would actually kind of suck. It goes about proving its point by being so terrible that you’ll just want to die. But you can’t. Because Bryce Boltzmann is immortal. Well, whoopity doo.

Actually, the most memorable part of the entire game for me was that, while playing, I made a joke about how sad my life was. And the saddest part of my life at that point was that I was playing NeverDead.

9. ORION: Dino Beatdown

While not sporting the best title ever written, ORION: Dino Beatdown sounded good on paper, and its trailers made it look like a lot like Halo with dinosaurs. How could anyone screw up a premise that awesome?

Unfortunately, when the game launched, it was so buggy that it was practically unplayable. In fact, some of its developers eventually went on record to admit that they pretty much hated their lives throughout the development cycle. (Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but Spiral Game Studios sounds like a terrible company to work for.)

Either way, this is a game that should be avoided at all costs.

8. The War Z

The War Z started out as a fairly interesting rip-off of DayZ, until the developers made some of the worst PR blunders we’d ever seen. They didn’t deliver on advertised features, they started charging players real-world money for respawns, and they ran their forums like an Orwellian police state. To top it all off, they were caught stealing art assets from The Walking Dead. It caused so much outrage that the game was eventually removed from the Steam marketplace.

Oh, and then there were some legal issues with the game’s title: Apparently Paramount Pictures wasn’t happy with how similar it sounded to World War Z. It looks like The War Z managed to piss off pretty much everyone in the world.

There’s a chance—albeit a pretty small one—that the developers at Hammerpoint will come through, change the name, patch up all the issues, formally apologize to the fans, and deliver something halfway decent in 2013. At the end of 2012, though, The War Z is nothing more than a huge waste of money to anyone who was able to snatch up a copy before Steam pulled the plug on it.

7. AMY

AMY was a title that a lot of us were legitimately excited for. Then, upon launch, it slapped us in the face with its insistence on being so damn bad.

Not only were the controls frustrating, but the checkpoint system was unforgiving. Which made the control issues even more frustrating. And that’s to say nothing of the absurd storyline.

Even though AMY came out at the very beginning of the year, our official review anticipated it being one of the worst games of 2012. It looks like we were correct.

See, you should listen to us more often.

6. Battleship

Okay, so this one’s not even fair. Battleship is a game that never had a chance to be good. As a licensed game based off a movie that had no right to ever exist in the first place, how could it have been anything but terrible?

Still, that didn’t stop Activision from trying to sell it to us. Screw Activision.

5. Resistance: Burning Skies

The Resistance series makes me sad. Resistance 3 was actually quite a good game, though it was unfortunately plagued with network issues that killed its multiplayer far too early in its lifespan. Still, the single-player campaign was great, and if you find this game in a bargain bin somewhere, don’t pass it up.

Burning Skies, though, takes a series that could have been great and stomps it into the ground like a cigarette butt. Even the word bland is too interesting to be used to describe Burning Skies. In fact, it almost feels like the game hates you the entire time you’re playing it.

The only upside: This might be the easiest Platinum Trophy you’ll ever earn.

4. Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified

Nihilistic Software released two games in 2012. Both of them were PlayStation Vita entries in existing FPS series, and both of them made this list.

3. Tank! Tank! Tank!

While Tank! Tank! Tank! may be a fun title to say out loud, it’s not very much fun to play. It’s a shallow port of an arcade title that was never really even worth the couple Chuck E. Cheese tokens we begrudgingly spent on it that one time we showed up drunk to our nephew’s birthday party.

In fact, we have to wonder why NAMCO Bandai insisted on throwing this into the Wii U’s launch lineup soup when they had such a strong entry already with Tekken Tag Tournament 2: Wii U Edition.

Either way, you’ll wind up getting sick of this one faster than you can say, “Tank! Tank! Tank!”

2. Postal III

Postal is a game series that’s mostly just known for being controversial. It’s like Grand Theft Auto, in a sense, minus pretty much everything that makes Grand Theft Auto games fun to play. By the time Postal 2 came out—which, I might add, was almost ten years ago—the formula was already getting stale. So why did we need a third game in this series? I have no idea.

Postal III is basically the Duke Nukem Forever of 2012, only it disappointed a far smaller group of people. And that’s only because no one cared to begin with.

1. Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor

While a Kinect-based mech title from the developers of Dark Souls doesn’t sound like it could possibly be all that bad, Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor was by far the worst thing we put into our Xboxes this year.

The game’s worst problem was that the controls didn’t really work as intended.

Wait, that last sentence was an enormous understatement. This game’s controls were so bad that they rendered it completely unplayable. In fact, our own Michael Rougeau tried to get through this one for his review, but he ultimately had to give up and admit defeat. It’s too broken for even the pros here at Cheat Code Central to ever finish it.

If you were unfortunate enough to find a copy of this one under your Christmas tree this year, you have our deepest condolences.

ByJosh Wirtanen
Editor / Social Media
Date: December 31, 2012

*The views expressed within this article are solely the opinion of the author and do not express the views held by Cheat Code Central.*